Could Open Source Render Facebook the Next AOL?

joabj writes "Now that Facebook has amassed more than 500 million users, a growing number of open source social networking developers are wondering if Facebook's photo sharing, status updates and other features wouldn't work better as Internet-wide standardized services. At the OSCON conference last week, the head of Identi.ca, an open source Twitter-like microblogging service, likened today's social networking services to the enormously proprietary online services of the early 1990s, like AOL or Prodigy. He suggested that just like SMTP and Sendmail standardized what were previously propriety e-mail services, so too could open source social networking stacks, like OStatus, render walled garden services like Facebook obsolete."

Comments

Too late

[sopssa]

They're too late to join the game. The problem is that Facebook already has everyone you know, so everyone joins it because everyone else already is there. Some random mumblings about walled gardens and open source won't make normal people switch over.

Difference with AOL (never even heard about Prodigy) versus email is that a lot of people used the standard email. I think AOL was mostly just US-centric too, I don't know anyone who would had actually used it. This was also time when internet was mostly used by geeks who understood it and valued open standards.

Someone in these kind of stories always suggests that you set up your own Facebook-like service or just a website. That's just thinking too much of yourself - why would people visit your site just to see your stuff? Facebook is great because it lets me easily see them from all the people, even if I don't keep in touch with them so much.

Also, how do you handle things like Facebook games and cooperation with people in them? Oh, you say Facebook games are stupid and people shouldn't play them. Arrogant attitudes like that don't really help either, because people obviously like the games. We aren't the ones to tell other people what they should or shouldn't like.

In Facebook's case one big service works a lot better than thousand small ones. How would you even search for people, places, events and so on with them? It would go back to the @something.com convention which defeats the whole purpose.

When I was recently visiting a different country I could easily search for the one guy I knew. From his connections I found everyone else I had met and also saw a lot of interesting events and businesses I wouldn't had otherwise known about. You can't really use a search engine for something you don't know about. This was the first time I actually understood how great service Facebook is - you just have to use it correctly.

Re:Too late

[Spad]

I will not sign up for a Facebook account unless something serious changes with regards to privacy and security. However, I *would* sign up for a service that allowed communication with Facebook users, so that I can more easily keep in touch with people, without exposing myself to all the Facebook crap that I want to avoid.

Such a service would provide a gateway through which people could move away from Facebook if they don't like it without having to deal with the problem of losing access to all their friends and profiles.

Re:Too late

[eldavojohn]

They're too late to join the game. The problem is that Facebook already has everyone you know, so everyone joins it because everyone else already is there. Some random mumblings about walled gardens and open source won't make normal people switch over.

Well let's travel backward in time to when Facebook was starting. Now let's rephrase your statement:

They're too late to join the game. The problem is that MySpace already has everyone you know, so everyone joins it because everyone else already is there. Some random mumblings about really bad user design and spam won't make normal people switch over and all the bands will stay on MySpace since Facebook doesn't host music.

Now if we go a little further back to when MySpace was starting:

They're too late to join the game. The problem is that Friendster already has everyone you know, so everyone joins it because everyone else already is there. Some random mumblings about ... about ... what was wrong with Friendster again?

Obviously the barrier you speak of has been broken down and it can be broken down again. You just have to understand your users better than Facebook does. And given the user feedback wouldn't you say that's possible to do?

I would counter that the real big dealbreaker would be ability to import all pictures and posts from Facebook into the new system. So you would have the user run an app from their local machine that needs their username and password and then scrapes everything off of Facebook while a loading bar processes it and then loads it into the new system. Option at the end to delete the Facebook account and maybe send an e-mail to Facebook telling them that if they don't permanently remove your user data from all their servers, you will get litigious. Of course, that's just a fantasy of mine ...

Re:Too late

[mdwh2]

In Facebook's case one big service works a lot better than thousand small ones. How would you even search for people, places, events and so on with them? It would go back to the @something.com convention which defeats the whole purpose.

I'm not sure what the problem with that is. I much prefer the current situation with email, where we have thousands of email services (they don't have to be "small", btw - e..g, GMail), but I can email someone on another service.

Compare with Facebook, where you can only message or read someone's status etc, if you join. And if they're on some other blog/networking site, you can't easily communicate.

As for searching, well, I think we've managed to do reasonably well at being able to search information on the Internet on multiple sites...

A similar issue applies to instant messaging - there is Jabber at least.

There have been some attempts to interoperate and promote open common standards - things like OpenID, RSS, FOAF. Unfortunately part of the problem is that it's a much harder problem to crack (e.g., how do you deal with things like privacy settings, so that a status/blog entry is only visible to certain people?)

Facebook is great because it lets me easily see them from all the people, even if I don't keep in touch with them so much.

Yes indeed - but how well does it work when you're updating on Facebook, someone else is on Twitter, and another person is on LiveJournal? RSS helps in this regard.

Re:Too late

[DarkSarin]

Problem is that most services (currently) that can communicate with FB users requires that you have a FB account--so that it knows WHICH FB users to communicate with.

Re:Too late

[PerfectionLost]

Try trillian. They have a facebook plugin.

Re:Too late

[PerfectionLost]

Unfortunately part of the Terms of Service of the Facebook API prevents storage of data received through the API on a remote source.

Re:Too late

[tomhudson]

Wo says they'd have to visit your site? All your site has to do is serve out the data to any app or plugin that they want to run. You're thinking too 1990 here.

And btw, open source won't turn facebook into another aol - facebook is doing that all by itself.

Re:Too late

[ledow]

As does pidgin - because Facebook now supports open standards:

http://www.facebook.com/sitetour/chat.php

Re:Too late

[jridley]

Totally doesn't hold up. Back when MySpace was big, I don't think I knew more than 2 or 3 people with MySpace pages. It was pretty much exclusively a teen/college hangout.

These days the only people that I know who do NOT have Facebook pages are people without internet connections at all (lots of my family) and people who are security curmudgeons (like me). Even people who barely get on the internet use Facebook. Lots of people only even have an internet connection so that they CAN use Facebook.

Re:Too late

[zr-rifle]

You can communicate with your friends without exposing your personal information to Facebook:

1. Register an account with a false name and leave it devoid of any personal content.
2. Add your friends telling them it's you, without revealing your complete name
3. Download the Pidgin IM (gratis & libre) client and use it to message your friends
4. Delete all your browser cookies relative to Facebook
5. ???
6. PROFIT!!!

Just don't be too revealing about yourself in your instant messages :)

Re:Too late

[hedwards]

Sigh, AOL if it existed now would be superior to AOL back then as well. It's a fair comparison, it's a walled garden with a huge share of the market. Back when AOL was huge, there wasn't much internet to speak of, and due to it's huge slice of the market it was tough to compete with since few people really knew how to use the internet.

Re:Too late

[imakemusic]

I assume you're talking about Facebook instant messaging. Facebook have since changed their chat to use XMPP which means that most multi-protocol messengers can use Facebook chat. You still need to have a facebook account to use it though, so it doesn't really help Spad. I guess you could register an account and not enter any details...

Re:Too late

[Anonymous Coward]

Neither Trillian nor Pidgin allow one to communicate with Facebook users without becoming a Facebook user oneself.

Re:Too late

[snowraver1]

Also, if you would like to communicate with your friends, you can also:

1. Call them (yes on the telephone).
2. Visit them.
3. Use one of dozens of Instant Messanger applications including: SMS, MS Messenger, and Blackberry Messenger.

Re:Too late

[painandgreed]

Also, if you would like to communicate with your friends, you can also:

1. Call them (yes on the telephone).

Let's see, time to call all my 254 friends to tell them the URL where the photos of my latest vacation are: Somewhere around 21 hours if I don't stop to talk about anything, eat, or go to the bathroom. Even if I limit to the friends that are local because I'm inviting them to BBQ this weekend, it's still around 10 hours.

2. Visit them.

Multiply the above times by 6 for local friends or turn hours into days for non-local friends.

3. Use one of dozens of Instant Messanger applications including: SMS, MS Messenger, and Blackberry Messenger.

Less people use those than use Facebook and you'd have to use multiple methods and keep track of which methods were used to contact which people.

Face it, your solutions are trivial and irrational. We already used those methods and still have them to use. If it was easier, quicker, or of better quality to use those methods, Facebook and other social networking services, or even the internet never would have become widely used. It's like telling people to go back to reading magazines and dead tree newspapers rather than use the internet. Next you'll be telling people that if they want to visit friends or family, they can use a horse and buggy instead of a car. The simple matter of fact is that Facebook has features that work better than other methods and has reached critical mass where it can be considered a standard. For making announcements, posting photos, or scheduling events, there's not much else that does it as well with as many people using it. It is also one of those "dozens of Instant Messanger applications" that you were talking about.

Re:Too late

[snowraver1]

I said communicate with friends, not "friends". I doubt that more than 10% of those 254 "friends" give a shit about your last vacation, and maybe 25% of that 10% give a shit about your BBQ.

Re:Great, open source

[Spad]

Except that all that will need to be done by the people hosting the services, not the users using them.

Farmville!

[AntEater]

Unless they can get Farmville ported to an open platform most facebook users will never leave no matter hope open or technically superior an alternative is.

Re:Farmville!

[OzPeter]

Unless they can get Farmville ported to an open platform most facebook users will never leave no matter hope open or technically superior an alternative is.

But Farmville *is* an open platform. Anyone can go there and try their hand at farming!

Re:Great, open source

[RabbitWho]

I think you're confusing OS - Operating system with OS - open source. They won't be making an operating system, they'll be making a website.
To front-end users it doesn't have to be any more complicated than facebook or bebo or orkut, the same types of processes will go into making it but the processes will not be secret. That's what open source means.

Re:Great, open source

[kaiser423]

Huh. Are you on some irc channel of basement dwellers that got caught in a net-split back in the 90's and got stuck in that time period?

You'd make a great find for some anthropologists.

Technology isn't Facebook's value per se

[MikeRT]

Facebook provides a few things, in no small part because of its sheer size:

1) Ability to find most of the people you know easily.
2) Ability to share a lot of information in a really, really easy with people.
3) Ability to do web-based social gaming in that same context.
4) Bring together basic blog and community organizing features.

The open source hurdles are really:

1) Discovering users.
2) Sharing assets between sites.
3) Coordinating communications between sites (if one wants to create something analogous to Facebook's wall).

Those are big hurdles, especially the ability (or perception of being able) to accurately discover other users one knows. Most of us here know that there is no guarantee that someone who claims to be a particular identity on Facebook isn't Chester the Molester, an enemy masquerading as a friend who didn't have an account before, etc. However, Facebook is perceived as safe by a lot of people, and an open environment would be perceived of in quite different terms.

Something will topple Facebook...

[Fortunato_NC]

It might be open source, or it might not be, but eventually, someone will come along with a "better Facebook than Facebook", and it will slowly die.

That's just creative destruction at work. It ALWAYS happens.

Facebook was a better MySpace than MySpace.
MySpace was a better Friendster than Friendster.
Friendster was a better Classmates.com than Classmates.com. ...and so on...

Google was a better Altavista than Altavista.
AOL Instant Messenger was a better ICQ than ICQ.
USENET was a better BBS than old-school dialup bulletin board.
Books were better scrolls than scrolls.

Something newer and better is going to come along. People talk about Facebook and the network effect "locking in" people, but creative destruction is even more powerful than the network effect.

Render Facebook Obsolete?

[damn_registrars]

No, Facebook will render Facebook obsolete. A lot of people are spending less time on their now than they did before. The novelty is wearing off, and eventually people won't care about it at all. It will eventually be replaced not by one single thing but by a variety of better things, including actual human-to-human interaction.

Re:Render Facebook Obsolete?

[oodaloop]

It will eventually be replaced not by one single thing but by a variety of better things, including actual human-to-human interaction.

How, by teleporting me to see my friends all over the world? If you could teleport me across the internet, I wouldn't be using the technology to idly chat with relatives and old class-mates, if you catch my drift. I'd use it go get a Monster drink everytime I need one. Like right now. Oh sweet blue Monster, how I miss you.

Great, open standards

[mdwh2]

Throwing insults at open source gets you +5 on Slashdot - I'd never thought I'd see the day.

If you want an example of an open source social networking site, take a look at Livejournal. Are you seriously telling me that the closed source Facebook is a better website than Livejournal? The UI is far better than Facebook, it's easy to use and doesn't have bugs, plenty of documentation, and was doing all this long before Facebook.

Aside from your comments being false (I use Windows personally, but I tried Ubuntu recently and found it worked and looked just fine; I didn't even need documenation), you're missing the point. This is more about open standards than open source as such. If you bother to RTFA:

Just like open standards for e-mail and the Web broke users free from proprietary closed networks of the early 1990s, so too could a new set of standards allow people to share their thoughts, photos and comments across the Internet, regardless of what social networking services they use

It's clear that it's more about open standards, than necessarily open source alternatives. If there were open standards, yes there'd be a load more "Facebooks", but closed source sites would still be free to make use of them - just as we have closed source email clients. So even if you believed that giving away source somehow made an application terrible, you'd still be okay.

I take it you must absolutely hate email then, because that's based on open standards like SMTP? Obviously all email clients must have terrible UIs, no documentation, and be a pain to install, by your logic...

Re:Great, open source

[Anonymous Coward]

Except for the ones that are. Firefox is the best example of this but there are many more like Pidgin and VLC. But this isn't about open source its about open standards. No one is saying that the future of social networking should be open source, just that it should be open standard. How many of these "non-techies" have a problem using HTTP? PNG? They don't because they don't have to interact with them directly, they are just standards.

You Betcha!

[assertation]

I see articles everyday that satisfaction is low among Facebook users. They are hanging around, in part, because there aren't any worthy alternatives from their perspective.

Once Diaspora is out, I'm getting a few good friends to sign up with me, then I'm deleting my Facebook account.

If Facebook pulls another "We did this, we didn't tell you, we don't care and you'll like it" stunt after that point, many other Facebook users will dump them too.

You're Thinking About It Wrong

[eldavojohn]

Unfortunately part of the Terms of Service of the Facebook API prevents storage of data received through the API on a remote source.

I never said to use the Facebook API.

For a mental exercise let's imagine (and really maybe Perl is the better choice here) that I made a Ruby gem called SocialWalker or something of the sort and basically I used mechanize to log into Facebook after getting the user's credentials. Then the application connects to my webservice that sends the latest selector strings (harvested from the latest Facebook interface by hand with SelectorGadget) and also Nokogiri to quickly scrape off all the information and date/time stamps. I think the pictures would be a different kind of effort but completely feasible.

At that point, the user could save it in some documented open social file format that any application can read ... it would probably be a tree directory with a bunch of XML files and images. Maybe they want to put that into Diaspora and I would have a way that the system would autopopulate their diaspora with this archived data? Maybe they want to do their own thing with it? Maybe I could spend time doing this for Facebook and MySpace and Friendster and whatever you send me a link to?

Yeah, I might not be able to spider your posts on your friends walls and maybe I won't be able to get some information and maybe the new system won't let you back timestamp things so that data has to be put in the comments on your new photo albums.

Maybe Google could be petitioned to create this system instead of some developer who prefers to get drunk on the weekends instead of liberating social network users? Google is the god of scraping and caching after all.

But it would look like nothing more than one user looking at all their history one last time ;) No API ToS violations needed.

Yes, it could.

[HeckRuler]

Yeah, I've had this idea as well. Because Facebook is simple. It's a webpage with text and pictures uploaded by users that has interfaces with others' web page. Rather then facebook or myspace, an open source alternative that people would run on their own. Websites with "user" uploaded content are, you know, old hat, so this boils down to protocols to deal with interaction between sites. And remember, this IS the social portion of social networks.

so what are all these interactions that need protocols:
-Establishing networks of trust, friendship, and hate. That whole "friends request" thing.

And that's essentially the only one that's required to make an open source distributed social network like facebook. Everything else is, not trivial, but it's been done. If it can be made cheap and simple enough (that itself a monumental task), then the masses could use it. But they won't, as inertial will keep them in facebook.
The rest is just features:

-Poke. It's one freaking message.
-Post on another wall/picture/whatnot. It's been done.
-Search through others pictures for tags of you.
-Set up events, invite people.
-Establish groups of people. The owner would host of course, but transferring ownership could be interesting.